[WikiEN-l] Re: note David Gerard's just placed on [[WT:AFD]]

[Jesse Weinstein]

On 1/25/06, Justin Cormack <justin at ...> wrote:
> On 25 Jan 2006, at 21:47, Fred Bauder wrote:
> > Properly done each fact (or set of facts) will point somehow to the
> > source, including the page in the source.
>
> How? And how will the article still be readable? And what is a fact?
> And what use is the page number
> when there are loads of editions of a source?
>
> No encyclopaedia is written like this.

I am sort of surprised and disturbed to see people getting so far-fetched with
the task of specifying a source for each fact in an article.  We don't need
magic new software tools, we don't need 500 obtrusive footnotes in the article,
we don't need any of this.

We can simply use a subpage.  On the subpage, put a list of quote from the
article, followed by citations (and preferably quotes) from sources which
support the quoted material from the article.  Simple, easy to do, requiring no
magic software support.  The disadvantage is it dosn't automatically update if
the article is changed, but on the other hand, that's actually an advantage; if
the article changes, we *need* someone to review the references, so having the
subpage not automatically update is actually a feature.

People might object that such a subpage is "just too hard", or "too
time-consuming", or various other things; my answer to this is simply - if you
don't want to work on it, don't work on it.  It benefits the encyclopedia, by
easing the task of factual verification; yes it will take many years to get lots
done, but so what? Each piece we do is one more that's done.  This is not a
problem, folks - it's just a big job.  Get to work! (if this is the sort of work
you want to help with...)

Jesse Weinstein (User:JesseW)